Muslima Latypova

They tried to cheat us too, but we didn't run

Which half to let go #

Latypova is the founder of Bahetle, a Kazan food company, and, according to registry data, the sole owner of OOO Bahetle-1, the company that operates it. The company makes much of what it sells. By 2017 it had two halves. At home in Tatarstan were the stores in Kazan and Nizhnekamsk and the frozen-food workshops that had stocked them since 2004. In Moscow stood the Tverskaya Street business, opened in 2006.

The threat came through the chain’s finances rather than its shops. In February 2015 a credit shock doubled the debt service Bahetle owed each year, and from then on the lenders were paid before anything else. The sums are set out in Bahetle’s brand profile.

When the network was put up for sale in its entirety, she had to choose what to keep. She could have let Tatarstan go and kept a shop front in the capital. She said she would part with the smaller half and keep the half that cooked.

The sale did not happen as offered, and staying had a cost inside the company. The founding managers were replaced in July 2018, and Elena Panchenko became executive director; Latypova remained general director of OOO Bahetle-1, the post she has held since 2007. As she tells it, Tatarstan’s president, Rustam Minnikhanov, said to her that Bahetle “must be preserved, it’s our national brand.”

She has put those years in her own words. “There was no time to cry; we understood the company had to be pulled out, it must not die… Every closed store is endless heartache for me,” she said in a Business Online interview published on 6 May 2026. The two sentences hold both sides of the decision: the company she would not let die, and the stores that closed while she kept it alive.

What she kept #

The workshops behind the Tatarstan stores went on cooking. The last Moscow store, on Tverskaya Street, closed on 30 April 2026 when its lease ended. The business she chose to keep, the one in Tatarstan, is the one that remains.

The hotel in Poland #

She had faced a choice like it once before. Latypova comes from Klachi (Клачи), a village in the Arsk district of Tatarstan, and from public catering: her documented career begins in the Soviet catering system of Kazan’s Sovetsky district, where by about 1990 she had headed a canteen and then directed a trade depot. The work was feeding people in volume, and it was the trade she would later build a company on. When private trade opened up in 1991, she left state catering for her own account, opening a cooperative café and, with her partner Rinat Mukhametshin (Ринат Мухаметшин), running a rail shuttle trade out of Tynda (Тында). People tried to cheat them, she has said, and they did not run.

Her official biographies put her in the general director’s chair at OOO Bekhetle (Бэхетле) from 1994. By 1998 Bahetle had not yet sold anything: it was an idea for one supermarket in Kazan and a sum of money set aside for its equipment, and she went abroad to buy it. In August 1998 Russia’s currency fell from 6 to 30 roubles to the dollar while she was in Poland with the money. Every dollar’s worth of imported equipment now cost 30 roubles instead of 6, and the store had not yet opened. “Suddenly I learn that the dollar in Russia has risen fivefold, from 6 to 30 roubles! I sit in the hotel with the money and think: buy, or better keep the money? … And I decided not to abandon my idea, not to mope, and to buy everything needed,” she told Business Online in an internet conference published on 11 April 2018. Equipment of that kind was not made in Russia, she reasoned, everything imported was expensive, and equipment lasts a long time.

Keeping the money would have held every option open in a collapsing currency; buying closed them, and committed her to the store whatever came next. In December 1998 the first Bahetle supermarket opened its doors on Sibirsky Trakt in Kazan, fitted out with the equipment she had bought at the bottom of the devaluation, months into a crisis and with its fittings already paid for. That store has since closed. The habit it taught held: in 1998 she committed the money rather than keep it, and in 2017 she kept the half of the business she had built to cook, and passed up the price it would have fetched.

The chain and the family #

The chain that went up for sale in 2017 had been built in a decade and a half: a second store in Nizhnekamsk in 2002, a third in Kazan in 2003, when Mukhametshin became a co-founder, the frozen-food workshops in 2004, Moscow in 2006, catering for the Summer Universiade in Kazan in 2013 and, in January 2014, Bahetle-Halal, a supermarket in the city’s Old Tatar Quarter. The recognition has been personal. She holds the title Honoured Trade Worker of the Russian Federation, conferred in 2007, and received the Order of Friendship in 2012, the Order “For Services to the Republic of Tatarstan” in 2014 and the Order of Honour in 2022, the year she was also made an Honorary Citizen of Kazan. Since 8 September 2024 she has been a deputy of the State Council of Tatarstan, elected to its seventh convocation.

The production side of the business has moved into her family. In May 2020 her daughter, Elvira Kharlamova (Эльвира Харламова), registered Fabrika Bahetle in Zelenodolsk as its only owner, and in December 2023 her grandson, Erik Kharlamov (Эрик Харламов), founded a second company there, Fabrika Bahetle-1. The two companies hold the factories; OOO Bahetle-1, hers, still runs the brand.

Last updated: November 7, 2026

Researched 27 sources in Russian.